Catalogue > At random

It depends on who you are that an entrance is closed or open to you. If you enact your coincidence as incidence you can outsmart this mechanism. The cast of the dice in a card game is a good example -- the ritual of including or excluding cards in order to make the number of cards dealt into a complete group or not. Another is the game played by Kafka's “Fellowship” (“Gemeinschaft”), which counts five people and does not know how to exclude a rejected sixth person, who keeps coming back. Does he embody that first coincidence of every biography -- being born somewhere? Does he speak in an accent that since Biblical times can prevent access? Can assimilation in language, clothes, gestures help? These questions come up for a foreign guest staying in a New York apartment building when the doorman doesn't simply repeat his rehearsed „how are you?“ and exchange it as a password. The coincidence of this encounter transforms the lobby entrance into the staging area for stories that roam through persons, places, times, and mix their affiliations anew.